This book collects together ten contributions by leading scholars in the field of Alexander studies that represent the most advanced scholarship in this area. They span the gamut between historical ...
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This book collects together ten contributions by leading scholars in the field of Alexander studies that represent the most advanced scholarship in this area. They span the gamut between historical reconstruction and historiographical research and, viewed as a whole, represent a wide spectrum of methodology. This first English collection of essays on Alexander the Great of Macedon includes a comparison of the Spanish conquest of Mexico with the Macedonians in the east that examines the attitudes towards the subject peoples and the justification of conquest, an analysis of the attested conspiracies at the Macedonian and Persian courts, and studies of panhellenic ideology and the concept of kingship. There is a radical new interpretation of the hunting fresco from Tomb II at Vergina, and a new date for the pamphlet on Alexander's last days that ends the Alexander Romance, and a re-interpretation of the bizarre portents of his death. Three chapters on historiography address the problem of interpreting Alexander's attested behaviour, the indirect source tradition used by Polybius, and the resonances of contemporary politics in the extant histories.Less

Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction

Published in print: 2000-09-07

This book collects together ten contributions by leading scholars in the field of Alexander studies that represent the most advanced scholarship in this area. They span the gamut between historical reconstruction and historiographical research and, viewed as a whole, represent a wide spectrum of methodology. This first English collection of essays on Alexander the Great of Macedon includes a comparison of the Spanish conquest of Mexico with the Macedonians in the east that examines the attitudes towards the subject peoples and the justification of conquest, an analysis of the attested conspiracies at the Macedonian and Persian courts, and studies of panhellenic ideology and the concept of kingship. There is a radical new interpretation of the hunting fresco from Tomb II at Vergina, and a new date for the pamphlet on Alexander's last days that ends the Alexander Romance, and a re-interpretation of the bizarre portents of his death. Three chapters on historiography address the problem of interpreting Alexander's attested behaviour, the indirect source tradition used by Polybius, and the resonances of contemporary politics in the extant histories.

This chapter addresses the very different presentation of the Persian Wars by 4th-century historians and by the patriotic Athenian orators, as writers of both forensic and political speeches, ...
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This chapter addresses the very different presentation of the Persian Wars by 4th-century historians and by the patriotic Athenian orators, as writers of both forensic and political speeches, including the epitaphioi logoi at which it was customary to catalogue Athenian victories. It is shown that it was the battles in which the Athenians were most involved (Marathon, Salamis) that unsurprisingly featured most prominently, building up an idealized picture of Athens in her finest hour and replacing the uncertainty and ambivalences in Herodotus' narrative with a ‘smooth-flowing teleology, in which each battle marches the Greeks forward to an overall victory’; the discussions of Plataea are equally idealizing in their amnesiac erasure of conflict between different Greek states. The ‘patriotic’ and idealizing strand in the reception of the Persian Wars found its first cohesive and near-uniform expression in the panhellenic ideology of such authors.Less

The Persian Wars in Fourth-Century Oratory and Historiography

John Marincola

Published in print: 2007-02-15

This chapter addresses the very different presentation of the Persian Wars by 4th-century historians and by the patriotic Athenian orators, as writers of both forensic and political speeches, including the epitaphioi logoi at which it was customary to catalogue Athenian victories. It is shown that it was the battles in which the Athenians were most involved (Marathon, Salamis) that unsurprisingly featured most prominently, building up an idealized picture of Athens in her finest hour and replacing the uncertainty and ambivalences in Herodotus' narrative with a ‘smooth-flowing teleology, in which each battle marches the Greeks forward to an overall victory’; the discussions of Plataea are equally idealizing in their amnesiac erasure of conflict between different Greek states. The ‘patriotic’ and idealizing strand in the reception of the Persian Wars found its first cohesive and near-uniform expression in the panhellenic ideology of such authors.